The death penalty and the rejection of humanity at its heart
Oliver Robertson examines the human costs of the death penalty and the harm it does to everyone connected.
We feel that we should at this time declare once again our unwavering opposition to capital punishment. The sanctity of human life is one of the fundamentals of a Christian society and can in no circumstances be set aside. Our concern, therefore, is for all victims of violence, not only the murderer but also those who suffer by his act.
The sanctioning by the State of the taking of human life has a debasing effect on the community, and tends to produce the very brutality which it seeks to prevent. We realise that many are sincerely afraid of the consequences if the death penalty is abolished, but we are convinced that their fears are unjustified.
London Yearly Meeting, 1956
A former colleague would say “never forget how to argue against the death penalty". It isn't a topic that Quakers in Britain is currently working on, but it goes to the heart of many of our principles.
The death penalty is the final word in rejecting humanity and the hope that people can change for the better. Death penalty cases are often marked by inadequate and flawed processes, which matter that much more because the consequences of an unjust outcome are irreversible.
The death penalty around the world
Death penalty cases hit the headlines in the UK when something new or unusual happens: in 2026, the Israeli law mandating death penalty only for Palestinians, botched executions in the USA and yesterday's decision to livestream a public execution in the USA. But the reality is that thousands of people's lives are ended each year, in a small number of mainly big countries that enthusiastically continue to kill as a way to punish crime.
With the likely exception of China, where reliable figures can't be gathered, Iran is the leading state judicial executioner in the world today. There has been a surge in executions in recent years, including hundreds killed in relation to anti-government protests or for being gay. Beyond what Quakers see as the obvious injustice of criminalising homosexuality or peaceful protest, this means thousands of lives irrevocably changed for the worse.
The wider human impact
One of the things I've admired about Quakers is the frequent focus on those rejected or forgotten about by the rest of society. With the death penalty, public attention is understandably on any victims of the original crime and on the condemned or executed person. But, as the Yearly Meeting quote at the top of this blog noted, the death penalty can damage everyone connected to it.
Lawyers representing those sentenced to death have talked about how the responsibility of their role can make it hard to focus on anything else, and the enormous burden of feeling like you're the only thing between a client and death. One said “I sometimes get so afraid that I am unable to work, and have to curl up under a blanket and go to sleep. Alcohol has a soothing effect on my nerves, and I have to stop myself from having more than one drink in the evening, or beginning the day with a gin and tonic. Ever since I started doing this work, people have been telling me that I age six years in six months."
Prison guards, who interact with prisoners on death row daily, can struggle both with distressed and mentally ill prisoners, and with developing connections and empathy towards people they know will be killed. Visits from prisoners' families are often difficult, especially when restrictive conditions are placed on the visit. As one prison officer said: "The 'most difficult thing' as an attending guard is 'to see on the other side of the glass … the families. Children. Never be able to touch. Never be able to hug'."
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If you're having to go to such lengths to make something seem okay, then it's probably not okay.
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When guards are involved in executions, there are often measures in place to mitigate their role or culpability – this might be doing one small task like strapping one of the prisoner's limbs down, or having blank bullets in all but one of the guns used in a firing squad so you're never sure if you fired the fatal shot. Indonesia limited the number of executions that a guard could be involved with over their career, and guards had three days of mandatory spiritual guidance and psychological assistance following an execution. If you're having to go to such lengths to make something seem okay, then it's probably not okay.
The lifelong effects on children
Finally, the impact on families, and particularly children, of the condemned. The Quaker United Nations Office in Geneva worked on this issue for several years (I was part of it), showing the lifelong effects on children of having parents sentenced to death or executed. They often don't get the practical and emotional support available to other children without a parent, because their parent is seen as a bad person, and they have to live with the trauma of waiting for, and then living with, a parent being intentionally killed.
There was a disturbing study of 200 schoolchildren in Iran who were taken to watch an execution (not of any of their parents). Three months after watching this, over half the children still exhibited symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
The impact on children has been recognised by the UN Human Rights Council, where governments meet to discuss human rights and agree new standards. A 2013 resolution on the impact of the death penalty on children is the only death penalty-related resolution that has ever been agreed by consensus. All countries, abolitionist and retentionist, recognise the damage that state-sanctioned murder does to children.
Quaker approaches to criminal justice have long focused on healing harms done and preventing future harms. The finality and irreversibility of the death penalty is anathema to that approach, and its harms stretch more widely than we often think. It often fails to bring the closure that is promised – most obviously in murder cases, where murder victims' families still have to live the rest of their lives with their loved one dead. But a death sentence and execution multiplies the harms done and the pain felt, rather than encouraging change for the better.
